On Monday, White House senior advisor Ivanka Trump tried her hand at what has become the raison d'etre of right-wingers over the past few months: trying—and failing—to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look bad on TV. When Fox News' Steve Hilton asked how Americans would react to policies like a Green New Deal, the president's daughter confidently predicted widespread skepticism. "I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something," she said. "People want to work for what they get. So, I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want."

She continues: "They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want to live in a country where there's the potential for upward mobility."

This line of reasoning is more than a little convoluted. She employs what sounds like the terminology of minimum-wage debates while ostensibly discussing the Green New Deal's federal jobs guarantee. (It is surprising, I know, that a professional rich person is not well-versed in the parlance of economic theory.) But let us unpack them in sequence.

First, it is not the case that that "people" do not want a jobs guarantee when they cannot find private-sector employment. A 2018 Civis Analytics poll found that 52 percent of Americans favor such a policy, and only 29 percent oppose it; the rest were undecided. It was most popular among Clinton voters, minorities, and young people, but 32 percent of Trump voters also expressed support; a Civis data scientist told The Nation that it was among the highest-performing proposals they'd ever polled. Even Rasmussen, a conservative pollster that exists primarily so Donald Trump can tweet out an approval number that's not in the toilet, found that 46 percent of all respondents would back a federal program that provides employment and health insurance.

Second, the evidence that Ivanka Trump has a solid grasp on the value of work is, to put it charitably, thin. According to a 2017 Washington Postinvestigation, employees at an Indonesian factory making Trump-label clothing made as little as $68 for 24 days of work. A second Postreport found that Chinese factory workers made just over $1 per hour to do the same. (These facts are very bad for someone who imagines herself to be a champion of empowering women in the workplace.) Meanwhile, her closest brush with the challenges of service-industry employment came as a child, when her family's household staffers financed the Trump siblings' struggling lemonade stand.

Most telling, though, is the rationale she provides to explain her unfounded assumptions: that Americans would reject a jobs guarantee because above all, they want "the ability to be able to secure a job" and "the potential for upward mobility." In theory, these things are true. But what Trump apparently does not realize is that for people who do not lend their last names to condo buildings, the assurance that they could secure a job that enables them to provide for their families disappeared long ago, along with the elusive "upward mobility" that the market promises to its highest achievers. Despite the president's over-the-top hyping for the economy, real wages have remained flat, thanks to factors like persistent inflation, a regressive tax policy, the erosion of the manufacturing sector, and—above all—the unyielding corporate law principle of shareholder supremacy.

This dynamic is the reason why Ocasio-Cortez-esque politics are on the rise within the Democratic Party, and why millions of Americans are re-examining their reflexive, Soviet-era animosity towards things labeled "socialist." It's also why so many jobs guarantee proposals now sit firmly in the political mainstream: In a country in which 4 in 5 people live paycheck-to-paycheck, unfettered capitalism is very obviously not addressing the basic needs Trump identifies here. While straining to repudiate the merits of a federal employment safety net, she manages to offer a spirited argument for enacting one as soon as possible.

This is not the first time Ivanka Trump has visibly struggled to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by her burning desire for her liberal New York City friends to like her on the one hand, and her craven loyalty to this administration on the other. As is often the case these days, the most compelling arguments for taxing the rich come straight from the rich who would be taxed.

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